The School of Audio Engineering (SAE) has announced that it will become a corporate sponsor of Ardour, an open source digital audio workstation project. The sponsorship ensures continual development of Ardour as a free, community-based audio recording and production software.

Ardour has previously received corporate support from Solid State Logic and Harrison, but has primarily relied on donations from the public and the dedication of creator Paul Davis.

This new initiative will support the further development of Ardour to become a viable DAW alternative for home and professional studio users, freely available to anyone. Development aims include a more integrated experience on Mac OS X. A separate version is intended to be developed which will be tailored towards beginner students, whilst also being available to anyone and staying compatible with the main branch of Ardour.

Ardour is a native multitrack recording, editing and mixing software. It includes a powerful mixer, automation as well as flexible routing and hardware independency through the underlying JACK audio system. Ardour offers various synchronisation options, varispeed playback, flexible editing options and many more features usually found in commercial products.

Ardour supports a wide range of audio-for-video features such as video-synced playback and pullup/pulldown sample rates. There are also powerful features such as “persistent undo,” multi-language support, and destructive track punching modes that aren’t available on other platforms. The software is currently available on Mac OS X and Linux operating systems.

SAE CEO Tom Misner comments, “The audio community will benefit from a viable open source alternative to established DAW products. For a while now some of our staff worldwide have been exploring and using Ardour and I have received positive feedback about this software. It has always been our priority to give our students access to a wide variety of systems. Ardour will be a great addition to our existing industry-standard Digital Audio Workstations.”